F/X Legend Stan Winston Leaves High-Tech Legacy to Digital Hollywood

Winston received four Oscars for his work—for visual effects on James Cameron's Aliens and Terminator 2 (for which he also won Best Makeup) and for Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. He was nominated for several other Academy Awards on films including Edward Scissorhands, A.I. and Predator, and will be remembered for dozens of others as well, from the gorilla in Congo to the Penguin's creepy look in Batman Returns.

Though Winston was a master of the pre-CGI blockbuster villain, lately he had begun to lead the film industry into a new generation of digital F/X. Most recently he had lent support to the visual wizardry for Iron Man and was just getting started on the next movie in the Terminator series, to be released next year.

And it wasn't just about the animatronics and digital makeup. Winston lobbied so that the hard working tech geeks in his field would receive the recognition they deserved. One source told the Los Angeles Times that Winston was instrumental in campaigning for a makeup-effects category in the Academy Awards. And on the hardcore technology side, it was his innovations that assured we will always remember the Terminator not as some goofy robotic spectacle, but as a frightening character whose image we keep away from young children.

We spend a lot of time here at PM debunking some of the crazy "science" in action, sci-fi and horror films, but we admire Winston for turning movies with fantastic premises—dinosaurs roam earth again!—into attractions that actually let us suspend our disbelief and enjoy the illusion of cinema. —S.E. Kramer

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